supplicium post mortem

Was I ever married, or was it all a brief, tender, perfect dream that I woke up from a year ago, this hour?

He woke up as usual that morning. He hadn’t been feeling well for a few days – chest pains. We’d been to the ER four days previous, and they had cleared him on every count. He worked out 7 days a week. He looked fine, they said. It was probably costochondritis, a painful but harmless inflammation of chest cartilage that would go away on its own. He was frustrated at being restricted from full workouts by the pain. He was frustrated that it interfered with wanking while sitting up. He was cranky. That morning, I got up after he did and approached him in the kitchen, me groggy, he dressed for work. “Don’t be anxious,” he told me, putting his arms around me and embracing me. I felt his green scratchy sweater and smelled his aftershave. He was having lunch out, he told me, so he might not want much dinner. It was an annual lunch he had with two colleagues at which they celebrated their AA birthdays, the anniversaries of their sobriety. He was sixteen.

“All this,” he told me, meaning, I supposed, his general mood, “is just getting used to what can’t be changed.” I can’t remember his exact words, but that was approximately it. We kissed each other goodbye, and off he went to work.

I talked on the phone to my mother that morning, complaining about what a terrible patient he was, how you couldn’t tell him anything, how annoyed he got when you fussed over him. I was trying to detach.

I was expecting a student at noon. At 11:25 the phone rang. It was his gym. He’s passed out while exercising, they said. He was in an ambulance headed to the hospital. I hung up, called my student’s mother to cancel, said I thought it probably wasn’t serious. He had costochondritis, I told her. He’d over-done it exercising. I wasn’t having it any more.

The subway to the hospital took a long time. I got there around 12:30. There was a lot of confusion at the desk. He wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there. I eventually got the ambulance on the phone. They’d taken him to another hospital. I got in a cab and in a few minutes, was there.

Inside, they let me go right back, as if they knew who I was. A guy shook my hand and introduced himself, a social worker. He took me into a tiny room with two chairs and a side table. He told me to wait. My heart started to beat hard, deep, fast. Why would I be greeted by a social worker? That was bad, right? But it couldn’t be that bad.

The social worker came back, but he wouldn’t tell me what was going on. I asked if M was dead, and he didn’t give me a yes or no answer. Shortly, the surgeon came out, and after some verbiage describing what they’d tried, said, “I’m very sorry your husband has passed away.”

I wasn’t the kind of person whose husband passed away. I used, often, to fear he’d die, usually in a plane crash. Sometimes I’d dream he had died, but when I woke up, he was there, most merciful reprieve. Whenever I went out – to a friend’s play, to a party, to a family gathering – I always felt such relief that we had our life to come home to. This was the real reality – him and me and our dogs and our apartment and Casey and Mark and RP and TL and the others. The world was just so much noise, not a real thing. My family I loved, but this was the new family. We were making the new family. We were trying to have children, too. The old, sad, long life was over; the new life was underway. At our wedding, and in a print over our bed:

Rise up, my love, my fair one
And come away!
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and done
The voice of the turtle is heard in the land

I had never dated. I would never have to date – thank God, I thought. I never wanted to date. He was flawed, terribly flawed, and so was I, but I didn’t want anyone else. When I would dream of the end of the world – a nuclear bomb, say – I would, in that dream, only want to get home to him, to be with him to the end.

Imagine a giant eraser wiping away the present and the future.

In the emergency room, he had a tube in his mouth, but he looked just like himself. He looked like he looked asleep beside me in bed. I’d never seen a dead body before. I touched him. He was still warm.

I wasn’t crying, not yet, but when I tried to dial the phone to call someone (the church, my mother, my sister), my fingers were trembling too much. This, I thought, was curious. Did I ask a nurse to dial for me? Or did I just redial until I managed it?

By 11pm that night, my whole family was in my apartment, some from as far away as California. My mother made toast and tried to get me to eat it. I took a bite, but it was like dust in my mouth. I sat on my dog’s bed with her and fed her the rest of the toast. My sister slept in my bed with me that night. I took one of M’s sleeping pills and crashed. In the morning, I got up before everyone else and walked the dogs, sobbing in the sunshine, praying with every breath for help. On the way home, part of the sidewalk had just been redone. Barely dry, some of it covered over, but right in the middle: Love from marky.

Back at home I got in the shower and suddenly fell on the floor, water pounding over me with the realization: RP is dead, too. What about Casey? Funny how you don’t realize everything at once.

It’s 365 days later. They say a year brings relief. It’s an ancient prayer practice, the Year’s Mind. They say it’s easier, having lived through every day of the year without them.

It isn’t easier.

Was I ever married, or was it all just a wonderful dream I woke up from a year ago this day?

I think it happened during M’s second visit to Gotham, about six weeks after his first. There was a lot of tgi during the trip, a lot of scenes, a lot of exploring what it was like to inhabit all these characters. The scenario was Mark and Casey were at “College,” a standard issue English Public School, in RP’s House with TL as the assistant housemaster. Casey was being provocative about so many things, and one I think was the issue of bedtime. I remember TL advising RP that if Casey (who at this time was 15ish and in the 5^th form – ha, what a joke!) was going to behave like a ten-year-old and not go to bed when she ought, then perhaps he should treat her that way. RP replied that she was definitely going to have a spanking for the bedtime issue, but he was more unsure about other matters with her. They discussed it more. And underneath the role of TL, I was burning all over my skin because I was so very ambivalent about that type of punishment. My line had thus far been – I only do English school discipline because it’s so unlike my own experience, and anything like my own experience is a turn-off. But here was RP announcing that an otk slippering was a perfectly natural matter of course that he was accustomed to taking when occasion demanded.

So, fast-forward, Casey got the slippering (across pyjamas), followed by a few strokes of the dorm cane unprotected (also the first time she received anything unprotected, which powerfully pushed against my/her excessive American modesty. When I was growing up, just having anyone see your underpants was enough to make you die of shame. cf. M’s English schoolboy upbringing where communal nudity was the norm, and his attitude that if anyone wanted to see his willy, it was a nice one and they could see all they wanted. Ha ha.) Long story short, this scene freaked Casey out so much that she decided to run away from College. She packed a knapsack. She was going to the airport. She was going to buy a plane ticket to Bolivia (where she’d visited once). She was escaping.

Scenes over, M and I go to sleep. In the middle of the night, though, Casey wakes up and sneaks out of the house. It was mild (for October) and wet out, that kind of warm, misty rain. The avenue outside the door was devoid of traffic, quiet, lit by yellow lamps. Casey – exhilarated – sprinted down the street, free!

Here’s where the extraordinary strangeness of playing kicks in, as anyone who’s really played will understand. At the corner: Casey out, another character in. Someone puts a quarter in the payphone (1995, ha ha), and dials a number which looks like my home number, but which is the number for College. It rings and rings, and for a while I wonder if he’ll answer it. Eventually, he picks up my ringing phone. Someone on my end asks for Mr. Prior and announces herself as Officer something. She’s found a runaway from his school, she thinks. He can come collect her at the station. Er…where is that, exactly, he asks? The officer gives helpful directions (go to x street, turn right, turn left at y street, one block up on the left). They ring off.

casey's rock (in daytime obv)

Casey, dejected, captured, makes her way to the appointed meeting point, perches on a large rock, and buries her head in her arms. Such despair. Such loneliness. Such longing.

And before too long, the footsteps of Church’s shoes are heard on the sidewalks of Gotham, and RP in his tweed jacket is walking towards her. He puts his hands in his pockets, stands near, and tells her gently to come on. She comes. They walk side by side, not touching, back to College in the mild, misting rain.

Inside, he tells her to change back into her pyjamas. She almost protests – I’m not staying! – but she doesn’t. He brings her a glass of water in the blue glass and sits next to her at the table. They talk, and she cries and cries.

What was it about that scene that made her cry so much? It was a few hours after her first otk experience, which deep down was what she needed and craved, even if she felt compelled to fight it to the point of trying to run away. Then there was the fact that RP was passing this test she’d unconsciously set for him. He’d come for her – out in the rain in the middle of the night, three blocks away to the big rock outside the “police station” [public library]. M was passing a test, too. He’d picked up a ringing telephone in a strange house in the middle of the night and answered the call to a scene – out in the rain in a foreign town, any time, anywhere, anyhow. No flinching, no hesitation, no limits on what he was prepared to play with me when summoned. And RP was handling Casey right, gently but firmly. There was no question of whacking her then, but neither was he backing away from what he’d done. I can’t really remember what he said or what she said, but I remember a lot of tears across the kitchen table, and on some level it was an admission of how much RP meant to her – and M to me. It was one episode in a long line of givings-in to that huge, drowning love.

HA!!!

I think I must have grew superhero powers in my sleep cuz I convinced TL to let me tweet “on an experimental basis just during spring break.” hahahahaha. She never would have sed yes if RP was here. I have a feeling that tweeting on an experimental basis is like “just looking” at a litter of puppies. You never come home without one.

So what if I have nothing worth tweeting about? Who does? I don’t have an iphone or a phone with any text plan at all. I considered telling her I need an iphone, but even with my superpowrz I know no-way-no-how when I see it. Which is just as well. When I see people out in public snogging their phones, I think – get a room, already.

Maybe tweeting will help lift this blog out of its slough of despond. It’s a cheerful word, like the yellow walls in the study.

suive moi

Turns out not to be such a dream come true. Actually, it takes all the satisfaction out of misbehaving. I still haven’t started my skool reports (which were due yesterday), and TL was actually reduced to bribing me tonight. OK, Casey, she sez when we finish walking the dogs, if we get pizza for dinner, then will you do your homework? You should have heard the pathetic pleading in her voice. Not like the TL marky used to call the Vamp (not cuz she vamped for men, but because it seemed like she never slept). I swear she must be cracking up, except there’s nothing fun about it. So we get the pizza and she tries to tell me I can’t watch t.v. until my homework is done, and I’m like, But Miss Lincoln, you don’t want me to eat dinner in front of the computer, so I’m just going to watch like 15 minutes while I eat. She sighs and goes off somewhere, and – long story short – I watch about an hour of The Devil Wears Prada, then the phone rings twice and the next thing you know it’s too late to start homework. So I win.

Except I don’t.  My stupid homework still isn’t done, and I know I’ve been a lazy cow, and there’s no one to help me with either one. In fact, for the record, here is the sum total of my useful accomplishments today:

• gave wolfhound bi-yearly shower (harder than it sounds) and post-shower grooming
• laundry
• writing in notebook
• showed some kid how to use excel to calculate averages
• explained to another kid what dew point means
• signed up for twitter – tho’ TL says I am forbidden to Tweet and if I do, even once, I’m going to be grounded from the internet for a week – and that’s just for the first offense. To be completely truthful, I don’t put much store by her threats, but I’m not planning to tweet because the fact is I have nothing to tweet about and no one to follow me even if I did. It would just depress me.

my slipper wot RP used to employ at times

Before, when I had bad days and felt useless and unaccomplishing, RP always had something to say about it. If I wound up getting in trouble (for that or something else), it helped cope with the frustration and self-loathing. Now, there is nothing to help me cope. I’m screwing up right, left, and center and all I’ve got is TL sighing at me, looking at me sadly in a way that says, You’re only hurting yourself. Well, I know that, don’t I? But what are you going to do about it? Answer: zilch. Hurrah for modern childhood. :-<

the business end (well worn, you'll note)

This has been a dumb, stupid, boring old day. First, we had to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning and I had to do homework. TL’s like: you should have done your homework yesterday. I’m like: why bother? It’ll just take more time then. So blah blah blah homework homework homework and all we got to eat was green tea, not even any breakfast (snatched half a plain bagel from the dining room at skool tho’, yuk). Then boring old skool all morning, and lunch, which is supposed to be good, was dumb – boring chicken and then some apple crumble thing for dessert, which was a total swiz because there’s only dessert 2 days a week at skool in Lent, and to waste it on a dumb apple thing? Plus I had to sit between boring people. So then it’s hack back here and more skool all afternoon – thought I’d go blind. Then walk the dogs, do the recycling, do the trash, sweep the sidewalk, blah blah. Finally TL went away and we could change into pyjamas. She’s still on about all the homework I owe, like reports that were due today (that I haven’t started yet, p.s.). But at least once she takes her shoes off, you don’t have to listen to her any more. Cereal for dinner and nothing on t.v. So that’s it for the long, boring, stupid day – yay.

Miss Lincoln

BTW, I don’t know what she’s doing with the cane. It’s not like marky’s around to whack anymore. Guess she thinks it’s a fashion accessory to go with her Miss Gulch shooz.

I had this idea for a story with a character like Father Darrow (from Susan Howatch’s Starbridge series) for Casey. Like, maybe he comes to look after Home School pro tem? When I thought about writing it, though, it felt like cheating. Because, Casey protested, it wasn’t true! The truth was that RP and Marky died in a plane crash, Home school was disbanded, and TL scarcely even exists anymore – or is it Casey who scarcely exists? How could we write about a new character coming into that world when there is no one? Then there is the problem that Casey traditionally refuses to step aside and allow any other bottom characters to emerge, so it’s no good writing about Father Darrow taking charge of some other semi-orphan. Boo.